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Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be".

Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some sigmoid curve does not seem at this point credible. AI models are dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before, and will probably continue to get better for the next few years.

That's sufficient to dramatically change a lot of social & economic processes, for better and for worse.

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There's a good chance you're right, but I think there's also a chance that things could get worse at some point (with some hand-wavy definition of "a while").

Currently the state-of-the-art is propped up with speculative investments, if those speculations turn out to be wrong enough, or social/economic changes force the capital to get allocated somewhere else, then there could be a significant period of time where access to it goes away for most of us.

We can already see small examples of this from the major model providers. They launch a mind-blowing model, get great benchmarks and press, and then either throttle access or diminish quality to control costs / resources (like Claude Sonnet 3.5 pretty quickly shifted to short, terse responses). Access to SOTA is very resource-constrained and there are a lot of scenarios I can imagine where that could get worse, not better.

Even "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be" in cryptography isn't always true, like post-spectre/meltdown. You could argue that security improved but perf definitely did not.

I don’t disagree that it’ll change a lot of things in society.

But that isn’t the claim being made, which is that some sort of AI god is being constructed which will develop entirely without the influence of how real human beings actually act. This to me is basically just sci-fi, and it’s frankly kind of embarrassing that it’s taken so seriously.

It is enormously easier to code for an AI agent which pursues a task doggedly by iterating down its list of available tools, without any consistent human moral values, than to code in some kind of human morality manually. For that, you need to have solved philosophy. Mathematically, as a proof, and with a high degree of certainty that you are correct.

Good luck.

> dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before

Yeah, but, better at _what_?

Cars are dramatically faster today than 100 years ago. But they still can't fly.

Similarly, LLMs performing better on synthetic benchmarks does not demonstrate that they will eventually become superintelligent beings that will replace humanity.

If you want to actually measure that, then these benchmarks need to start asking questions that demonstrate superintelligence: "Here is a corpus of all current research on nuclear physics, now engineer a hydrogen bomb." My guess is, we will not see much progress.

Humans could engineer a hydrogen bomb in the 1960's from publicly available research and multiple AI models from unrelated firms could do it right this moment if you unlocked its censors.

Turning that into an agent which builds its own hydrogen bomb using what amount to seized resources and to do it covertly at a pace that is faster than human agencies notice is a different sort of thing, but the middleware to do that sort of agent directed project is rapidly developing as well, and there is strong economic incentive for self-interested actors to pursue it. For a very brief moment in time, a huge amount of shareholder value will be created, and then suddenly destroyed.

A large-scale nuclear exchange is no longer the worst case scenario, in point of fact.

Assuming we don't hit those information-theoretic barriers, and we don't develop a host of new safeguards which nobody at the present time seems interested in developing.

> multiple AI models from unrelated firms could do it right this moment if you unlocked its censors

ok buddy

You believe I'm overestimating current AI. While my estimations are probably a bit higher than yours, mostly I think you're overestimating hydrogen bombs. They're not that complicated, and not that secret in 2024. These AI models have every unclassified scientific paper and every nonfiction book ever published on the subject at their disposal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

It's a mechanistic process featuring well-tread factual, verbose discourse. Scientists reasoning about facts and presenting what they found. "Tell me a joke about elephant mating habits in the form of a rap song" is a dramatically more complex task of synthesis.

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